Rich Yeselson

Recent Articles

I nvoking “dysfunction” is now the basic black of punditry about American politics. As the British political theorist David Runciman recently observed in the London Review of Books , “Commentators find it almost impossible to write about American democracy these days without reaching for the word ‘dysfunctional.’” Consider the lowlights of our political culture in just the past 15 years: a puerile impeachment; the subsequent president elected via a Supreme Court filled with political allies; a radicalized Republican Party, convinced that taxation and domestic government spending are a form of socialism; a failure by bipartisan elites even to prioritize, let alone tackle, continued high unemployment and the looming catastrophe of climate change. As Runciman’s editors titled his own essay on America’s lumbering democracy, “How can it work?” Courtesy of W. W. Nortn and Company It is one measure of the power of Ira Katznelson’s important, overstuffed new book, Fear Itself: The New Deal...

Sheldon Dick/Farm Security Administration Strikers guarding window entrance to Fisher body plant number three in Flint, Michigan (1937) L et’s clear one thing up. “Right to work” laws, which permit employees working at a unionized workplace to refuse to join the union or to pay the union the cost of representing the worker, are designed to weaken the economic and political power of organized labor and, by extension, wage workers. Full stop. They allow workers to “free ride” all the benefits of a collective-bargaining agreement (increased wages, benefits, rights to adjudicate a dispute with a supervisor, safety and health requirement beyond those mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, etc.) negotiated by the union without paying any of the union dues their fellow employees pay. The vaunted libertarian argument in support of right to work would be far more convincing if libertarians supported the rights of employees to reject at their discretion the countless...

AP Photo George McGovern of South Dakota pays a visit with his wife to the floor of the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, August 25, 1968, where he will attempt to capture the Democratic presidential nomination in the National Convention starting on Monday. G eorge McGovern, the former Senator from South Dakota and 1972 Democratic candidate for president who died Sunday at the age of 90, was perhaps the greatest exponent of an alternative American patriotism of the end of the 20 th century. In this respect, McGovern’s predecessors were men and women like Jane Addams, W.E.B. Dubois, and William James. Historian Jonathan Hansen has described this critical patriotism well as the “claim that critical engagement with one’s country constitutes the highest form of love.” The critical patriot rejects the conventional patriot’s belief that loyalty to the state and, especially, to its military aims should be reflexive and unconditional. Critical patriotism fears that the patriotism of flag...

Flickr/musicFIRSTcoalition W hen Arlen Specter, the former Pennsylvania Senator who died Sunday at the age of 82, was negotiating to become a Democrat in 2009, he believed that he would retain his GOP-acquired seniority on the Senate committees in which he served. Specter thought he’d gotten a commitment from Majority Leader Harry Reid—Specter’s switch would not only help him avoid a primary challenge from the right, but would give the Democrats 60 votes in the Senate. However, the Democratic caucus resented the idea that Specter could jump ahead of lifelong Dems on the seniority list. Reid was thus unable to keep the agreement with Specter. Losing the committee seniority, Specter said, according to Politico , “was the worst moment of my life.” The worst moment of a then-79-year-old man’s life? Think about that. Specter had, by then, lost his parents. He had gone through several bouts of cancer, a benign brain tumor, and cardiac bypass surgery in the previous decade. He had two...

D id Timothy Noah catch a wave or anticipate one? In 2010, Noah, a longtime public-policy reporter now at The New Republic , wrote a ten-part series in Slate about American economic inequality. This was at a time when the most discussed issue in U.S. politics was how much government Tea Partiers aimed to slash and how quickly we must balance the budget—even in the face of the worst downturn in eight decades. Then, about a year after the Slate series, Occupy Wall Street and its proxies around the country seemingly awakened the nation to the vast disparity of wealth between the top 1 percent and the rest of us. This was just in time for The Great Divergence , Noah’s expanded book on the subject, to refer to the movement in an introduction. On the other hand, important ideas may lie dormant for ages, unacknowledged beyond a few specialists—and then, suddenly, they pervade “the air around us,” as an old professor of mine used to say. So it is with the issue of inequality, whose current...